Get up and running with R, Sweave, and LaTex

There are a lot of great references on the web on how to levarage LaTeX for reporting and presentations (beamer), but as someone who is completely new to R and reproducible research, I was having a pretty hard time figuring out simply what to do (what tools, where do you edit, etc.). Eclipse as a programming environment has been growing on me, but I simply could not get it to render me a PDF.

In this post, I am going to link to a few resources and attempt to explain it to you in a way that hopefully will get you up and running. It really is pretty straight forward. Learning how to modify commands, however, thats another post for another day.

Assumptions:
You have R up and running (I am using 2.10.1)
You are just trying to create a document – I tried to create a presentation (Beamer) and got an error when trying to open the PDF….I will try to figure this out later

First, save the following text below as a .rnw file

@found at http://www.math.ucla.edu/~getreuer/latex.html
documentclass[12pt]{article}
begin{document}
The #1 story is that this article was compiled today (today) with
LaTeX. To try some commands, it includes textit{a few fancy}
textbf{fonts}.
end{document}

Here is the code:

### Getting started with Sweave in R
### helpful links
# My favorite
# http://biostat.mc.vanderbilt.edu/wiki/pub/Main/TheresaScott/ReproducibleResearch.TAScott.handout.pdf
# Others
# http://www.wekaleamstudios.co.uk/posts/creating-a-basic-presentation-using-latex-beamer
# http://jeromyanglim.blogspot.com/2010/02/getting-started-with-sweave-r-latex.html
### Simply, LaTeX is just formatting embedded inside of your text
### You can take templates online and save/edit in Notepad, just save as .nw
### The process is simple, text editor, save as .nw, run Sweave to generate .tex
### , compile in R
### There is also a stand alone program MikTex that will compile for you as well
### My basic code:
#### set the working diretory and check it
setwd("C:/Users/You/Desktop/Test Sweave/")
getwd()
#### Sweave is a function that will work on the .nw file
#### ?Sweave
Sweave("Test.nw")
#### You should see some code saying
#### Writing to file Test.tex
#### You can now run LaTeX on 'test.tex'
#### Now we simply have to compile it
tools::texi2dvi("Test.tex", pdf=TRUE)
#### You can also load the tools library first - shorter way above
#### library(tools)
#### texi2dvi("Test.tex", pdf=TRUE)
#### Voila, its that easy. No need to bother with eclipse plugins
#### The PDF will be saved to the working directory

One Note: You may get prompted to install some additional packages…I said Yes.